Along with the progress of an information society, an enormous amount of data is accumulated in a device equipped with a storage. It is very convenient to exchange accumulated image data and document data (to be generically referred to as document data). However, this raises the risk of information leakage.
The Personal Information Protection Law has been in force since 2005. Companies are responsible for appropriately managing information, and it is essential to their survival. In this situation, companies have made efforts to prevent leakage of information from electronic documents, and even if information leaks, easily track it.
As one of these efforts, there is proposed an image processing apparatus capable of grasping the access log and operation log of all managed document data, and detecting a user, document data accessed by him, and an operation executed to the document data by him (see, e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-304861).
However, the conventional technique suffers the following problems.
(1) When many operations were done to given document data, the access log needs to be visually checked to search for a cause of information leakage such as an operation which leaked information and a user who did it. This is very cumbersome.
(2) When given document data was viewed or output after it was electronically copied or its document name was changed, it is difficult to detect a user who accessed the original document data.
(3) When given document data was transferred to a third-party apparatus, the apparatus cannot track the viewing or print state of the document data.